Wikipedia
The NuMachine, or Nu machine, was developed in the late 1970s at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) by Professor Steve Ward and his research group in concert with Western Digital. It was a project to design a computer workstation that interfaced with local area networks using microprocessors. It included a new operating system called Trix, which the GNU Project used for its first attempt at an operating system kernel.
The NuMachine was first developed commercially by Western Digital. It was bought by Texas Instruments in 1983. Texas Instruments dropped the NuMachine development in 1985 in favor of the TI Explorer.
Its main legacy was a bus architecture called NuBus that was later adopted by Apple Computer for its Macintosh II and by NeXT, and influenced the design of the PCI bus.